The Digital Queue: Flashmobs in Line, Online and the New Aesthetics of Community Building

In 2004 an online group Flash Mob Latvia (FM Latvia) staged a gathering in in the Old City of Riga, forming a mock queue in the middle of Livu Square. The performance, titled ‘The Queue to Nowhere,’ featured fifty people and was joined by witnessing outsiders. The line started and ended in the middle of the square, where there are noticeably no businesses, no products, and no servers. The video was uploaded onto YouTube, where it garnered 26,000 views. This is one example of many flashmob queues that have appeared across post-socialist cities in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Russia, organised online through social media networks and implemented in person. This essay discusses how these social media groups gather, reviving the half-dead phenomena of the Soviet-era queue to create new aesthetics of community building. Flashmob queues do not result in actual purchases, subverting the norms of the marketplace and transforming empty practices of consumption into new local cultural expressions rooted in everyday life.